Amazon launches #AmazonWishList, now you can add products to your Wish List by tweeting
Twitter has long been evolving as a vital cog in the global e-commerce wheel, and now Amazon is turning to the social network to make it easier to add items to your Amazon Wish List.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second hashtag-commerce feature Amazon has built with Twitter this year: May 2014 brought #AmazonCart, which let users add items to their cart by replying to a product tweet, and September's #AmazonWishList extends the same tweet-to-Amazon pipeline from buying intent to browsing intent — a lower-commitment action that should catch more casual users. The relationship goes back further than the hashtags: Twitter was already surfacing Amazon content on its site in 2011, so the two companies have been layering commerce onto an existing distribution tie for three years.
The pickup was broad for a feature launch — Engadget, CNET, Lifehacker, Laptop Mag and bizjournals all ran it the same day — reflecting how closely the retail press is tracking whether Twitter can become a real shopping surface rather than just a marketing channel.
First-order effects
- Amazon gains an intent-capture funnel that runs entirely inside Twitter: any user who sees a product tweet can add it to their Wish List without opening Amazon, feeding retargeting and gifting data straight into Amazon's accounts.
Second-order effects
- Twitter gets proof that hashtag-driven transactions work at scale with its biggest retail partner, strengthening its case as it courts other merchants and payment partners for similar integrations; retailers outside Amazon now face the question of whether to build comparable tweet-to-cart flows or cede the channel.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, social platforms shift from advertising venues to transaction infrastructure, with commerce features like wish-listing and buy buttons becoming table stakes in platform partnerships rather than experiments.
The trend: Twitter is being rebuilt as a direct commerce channel, with Amazon's successive hashtag features moving it from brand marketing toward transactional infrastructure.